A visit to Sparrowhall in July

View from the Sparrowhall guest bedroom
in the summer evening light.

Hello, I’m Jane, I live in New York City, and Jessica invited me to write a guest blog about my trip to Orkney and Sparrowhall in late July 2022. I have known Jessica since 1993 or so and have visited her in Bwlchyrhyd and Ffairfach during past trips to Wales, most recently in 2019. So I was excited to see this place that Jessica had chosen for her forever home and to meet her partner Danny and the animals at Sparrowhall. I was already in the UK with my bicycle, so I traveled to Inverness by train and cycled through the Highlands to Scrabster to catch the ferry and became Jessica’s first Orkney visitor. Warning: this blog entry is long. Possibly endless. Sorry about that. The bottom line: visit! It’s awesome! And cold, so bring warm clothes, even in summer. And a swimsuit for your North Sea plunge!

 

Part I –Adventures on Mainland

 

I was a bit unsure how long it would take me to cycle the 140 miles from Inverness to Scrabster (turned out to take 2-1/2 days), so it was a bit of a last-minute suggestion on my part that Jessica meet me with her bike on Mainland, the main island of Orkney where ferries from the Scottish coast (and Sanday) arrive, so we could ride around and see the sights together and travel to Sanday together the next day. Because of the ferry schedules and the distance between the island’s two ports, I couldn’t get to Mainland and then Sanday in the same day, and I didn’t want to wait a whole extra day to hang out with Jessica. Jessica graciously rearranged her schedule to accommodate. We each arrived at the ferry terminals on opposite sides of the island at about the same time on a Tuesday afternoon in late July, Jessica in Kirkwall and me in Stromness. I dropped my stuff off at the B&B in Stromness and headed eastward by bike, while Jessica hopped on a westward bus with her Brompton folding bike, using a free bus pass thoughtfully provided by the Orkney government to all island residents—including those who live in places like Sanday with no bus service, so this pass had apparently been tacked to Jessica’s fridge for months, waiting for an opportunity. We met at the Stones of Stenness in between the two arrival points.

Stones of Stenness

The weather was fantastic and uncharacteristic—sunny with very little wind (don't expect that kind of weather when you visit!). The standing stones are impressive. You can see lots of photos of them online, but there’s something about being with them in their natural setting that is powerful. We also really liked the Barnhouse Settlement, a short walk beyond the stones in a neighboring field. We followed the signs to it and found ourselves away from the flock of tourists, who hopped in and out of tour buses to take selfies in front of the Stenness stones and didn’t seem to even notice Barnhouse. Barnhouse is a village from about the same Stone Age period as the more famous settlement of Skara Brae, also on Mainland, but fell out of use about 450 years earlier and has some curious characteristics that suggest ceremonial use, perhaps linked to the nearby standing stones.

 

Creepy selfie with Jessica's back at Barnhouse Settlement.

After appreciating the stones and the settlement while catching up on the past three years of our lives, we moved on to the next site a short bike ride down the road. The Ness of Brodgar is a major Neolithic site being uncovered through an active and ongoing archeological dig which keeps uncovering more exciting things. We didn’t get a tour because they were just closing up for the day, but we managed to walk a quick circle around the site—much of which is protected from the elements by sheets of black plastic held down by old car tires, so don’t expect the most scenic of views. If you’re an archeology nerd or a fan of neolithic sites, you can learn much more from the website. But it was still cool to see the archeologists packing up their finds for the day. Then it was on to the Ring of Brodgar, just a few minutes up the road. This massive Neolithic stone circle (really two circles, one inside the other) is huge and impressive. We could only walk around the outer perimeter and couldn’t approach the stones because of protective measures in place at the site, so we walked around it in a big circle surrounded by other tourists. This is what happens if you visit in the peak summer months, but it’s a large site so it didn't feel too crowded.

Ring of Brodgar. Bigger than it looks in this photo. Somehow I kept most of the tourists out of the shot.

We later learned from our B&B hosts that a cruise ship with 1,800 passengers had arrived in Kirkwall that day, and another with 4,000 passengers would arrive the day after we left.

We headed out in time for a quick pee stop at the Maeshowe visitor center just as it was closing—there aren’t a lot of sheltered spots to pee in the wild around that area by the main road, especially with the land being so flat(tish) and treeless, and with so many tourists wandering around. Maeshowe is a Neolithic chambered cairn to the east of the Stones of Stenness, and we didn’t actually see it. The Maeshowe visitor center is down the road from the cairn to the west, south of the Brodgar sites, and serves tourists coming to all the sites. It has a gift shop which we did not explore—they were eager to get us out of there as quickly as possible so they could close up and go home.

Interesting architecture in Stromness:
these odd cutaway corner walls.

 

 

We then cycled to Stromness, where the B&B was a bit of an adventure, with a defective door handle breaking off in Jessica’s hand and locking us in the room, to the irritation of the hosts, who scolded us not to break anything else. The man host (the B&B is run by a husband-wife team) later came back and said it wasn’t our fault—the door handle had a manufacturing defect. Yes, we knew it wasn’t our fault, thanks. We went out to wander Stromness and pick up takeout Chinese food at one of only two eating establishments open at that point in the town. The town is very cute with little alleys leading to boat docks next to the old houses and on the other side of the main street, steps and alleys winding up the hill. We were curious about a feature of the architecture—odd cutaways on the ground floor corners of buildings along the stone-paved streets and alleys. Still not sure what those were for.

 

Back at the B&B, we ate our takeout and had some further adventures with our hosts and their door handle—the new handle the host installed while we were out turned out to also be defective, in a different way, and once again we were locked in the room, at which point the host decided we must be silly fools who don’t understand how doors work and proceeded to demonstrate the technique, ignoring our attempts to warn him and in the process locking himself in the room with us. He had to call his wife to come down from upstairs to rescue him. He removed the offending door handle and from that point we just had an empty hole where the handle was supposed to be.

 

Skara Brae! On a perfect day.

Breakfast was tasty, featuring kedgeree (whitefish with rice) and black pudding. The woman host does all the cooking herself, and makes all her own jam and marmalade, so that was a bonus and she seems to like guests who appreciate the food. But she had a bone to pick with Jessica about the answers provided on a ridiculous, arbitrary, and extremely non-official form of her own creation that asked where we were going next and how long we would stay. The form didn’t allow for two people with different plans, so Jessica answered for herself: “Sanday” and “the rest of my life.” The host did not appreciate this. I kept asking whether there was some other information I could provide to satisfy her, but she seemed to just want to glare at Jessica and release some pent-up irritation. She claimed the form needed to be accurate in case the Coast Guard found a random body on the beach. OK, sure. Wait, what? Also, it is accurate, because Sanday is Jessica’s forever home. So…? Then the other B&B guest who was having breakfast at the same table pointedly volunteered that her mother was born and raised on Sanday, is now in her 90s and living elsewhere, and hates all the incomers for ruining the island. Friendly early morning chatter around the breakfast table, whew!

Jessica on the beach at Skara Brae.

Fortified with coffee, food, and rage at annoying humans, we headed off on our bikes to Skara Brae, which was much more exciting in real life than on the internet—well worth visiting in person. The matching little semi-underground stone homes each with stone bed boxes around a central fire pit facing a stone shelving unit, all linked by tunnels, seem super cozy and ready to move in. We asked a friendly guide about a trap we saw at the site and she explained about the island’s stoat eradication program—stoats were introduced in recent decades and have wreaked havoc on the native shorebird population, slaughtering eggs and chicks. The guide helpfully explained the stoat’s appetite by telling us it eats the proportional equivalent of 46 fish and chip dinners in a day.

The only food photo I took.

We decided we didn’t have time to see any of the other sites on Mainland the same day without getting stressed about ferry timing, but we were hungry so we stopped for a roadside picnic before cycling to Kirkwall. We got to Kirkwall with enough time to explore the main shopping street and for me to buy some haggis at a local butcher shop for our Sparrowhall dinners.

 

The ferry ride was pleasant—the weather was still fantastic—and we had some added excitement when we spotted a pod of orcas following the boat at a distance (too far away for photos, sadly).

See ya later, Mainland! The view from the back of the ferry.

Part II – Sanday… and Sparrowhall!!

 

Greeted at Sparrowhall by ducks in military formation. And a chicken!

Danny picked us up at the Sanday ferry terminal and we crammed the bikes and panniers into the back of the car and drove across the island to Sparrowhall, where we were greeted by the adorable duck family, who move themselves around the farm with military-like discipline. The ducklings are nearly as big as mom at this point. They are all matching in their dark colored plumage—like mom—except for one blonde duckling, the odd one out.

Cookie Monster!

I met Cookie who is of course adorable, a purring, feisty, fearless little monster. Jessica and I took a stroll through a grassy lane across the fields to drop some mail in the postbox. We were discussing local grain production (barley!) and I stopped to ask about a particular grass stalk with what seemed like grain at the top. Jessica didn’t know, but as she turned around to look, she realized that Cookie had followed us all this way, leaping over the tall grass like a bunny to keep up. It was too far to turn back but we couldn’t risk Cookie following us back home as we returned along the main road or finding her way back to Sparrowhall on her own, so I picked her up and carried her the rest of the way in my jacket, holding her tiny fuzzy body against my chest and gripping her firmly whenever she squirmed as cars passed us.

 

Soon enough it was dinner time and Wednesday night is chippy night at the Kettletoft Hotel, so we drove over to pick up some very nice fish & chips with mushy peas which we devoured back at Sparrowhall. Three orders of fish and peas and two orders of chips were perfect—Jessica thought it might be too many chips but I was still trying to recover my energy from all the cycling over the previous few days so I ate more than my share of chips. Mushy peas, by the way, sound kind of disgusting and I had actually never tried them, I don’t think, but they became my new favorite thing and I will never again order fish & chips without them, if given a choice. So good!

The elusive Freya appears!

Thursday Jessica had to work and I went for a bike ride and managed to find my way back without getting lost. I don’t know what happened the rest of the day but I suspect it involved a lot of Cookie cuddles. Cookie is very amenable to cuddles as well as feisty play. I saw Freya a few times too, sadly reluctant to return to her now Cookie-infested home. We all kept telling Freya to give Cookie a good smackdown—since Cookie would clearly be unfazed by that—so that harmony could be restored, but poor Freya has not yet followed our advice and is just steering clear.

Then it was my turn to make dinner: haggis! Jessica had to explain to me how to boil it and serve it, and now haggis is my other new favorite thing. I accompanied it with my adaptation of a Greek dish called skordalia—potatoes mashed with olive oil (or in this case, Scottish rapeseed oil), garlic, and fresh herbs, especially oregano, from the garden. And a side dish of sautéed cabbage with onions, garlic, and spices. I also found some sad broccoli that was sprouting in the fridge and needed to be used up, so I sautéed that with garlic and ginger and explored the cupboards for sauces—I ended up using some Vietnamese fish sauce and some vinegar and I don’t remember what else, maybe cumin seeds? Anyway, that was dinner #2.

Greylag geese above Sparrowhall.

The next day, Friday, was the Selkie swim: a group of women who gather to bathe in the sea. Jessica has been swimming with this group for a while. We drove to the beach. It was warm enough for me to stay in the water for what seemed like about 15 minutes, even though I lacked the swim caps, booties, and gloves that everyone else was using. It was refreshing and exhilarating! The sea is SO incredibly clear and clean on Sanday. We changed back into our clothes and everyone stood on the beach chatting and sipping tea from thermoses. Then the other selkie swimmers left, and Jessica and I walked along the beach a bit and then wandered over to—and crawled into—the Quoyness Neolithic chambered cairn.

Quoyness chambered cairn

The beach was beautiful, and the water is a stunning blue. Sadly we saw quite a few dead large birds on the beach, especially gannets. They are dying from avian flu, apparently. We also saw some dead jellyfish. The tide pools are clear and seem strangely devoid of life, as Jessica pointed out to me. No sign of fish, or crabs, or mollusks. Just the occasional empty limpet shell. Maybe the birds eat everything? There are tons of seabirds on Sanday, since they have no natural land predators. (Thankfully Sanday doesn’t have the same stoat problem that Mainland has.)

The beach near the cairn.

On the way back to Sparrowhall after our beach jaunt we stopped by the community store where Jessica does all her shopping. It’s a nice little store with all the basics and a fairly random assortment of non-basics, and apparently you can special order almost anything so that’s very cool and convenient—no need to be ordering everything online. Plus they have a lot of stuff in bulk including milk and laundry soap so Jessica brings bottles and refills them because guess what? Waste has nowhere go on this tiny island (or anywhere on this planet for that matter) so reuse is critical. Jessica showed me the old quarry on their property that has been a dump for decades, full of rusted farm machinery, cars, tires, and random assorted trash. There is basically no way to get scrap metal off the island. No one will come pick it up. If someone wants to start a scrap metal sailing club in Orkney to pick up all this scrap from all the islands and a metal recycling plant to process it, they could do a lot of business.

 

Friday was pizza night! So at the community store, Jessica was chatting with the woman who works there (Shari?) about how we were going to the pizza place that night. She told us the hot honey pizza is great. Her store co-worker Aaron who is also Jessica’s co-worker at the Craft Hub said he had never been to the pizza place because it’s too posh.

I think this is the view from the pizza place?

When the designated pizza hour came (reservations were strongly recommended so Jessica had reserved our table), we drove to the pizza place and indeed, it was kind of posh but the pizza was also very tasty. (Danny didn’t feel like going and I think he finished up the previous night’s leftover haggis instead.) Jessica and I ordered one pizza each—she got the one with hot honey and I got one with Italian nduja sausage and no cheese. They were both really good. We sat and chatted for a while and then we both wanted more so we split another pizza with pineapple and anchovy and no cheese, which turned out to be a great combination, salty and sweet.

 

The colder beach.

The next day, Saturday, involved swimming again. Really it would be more accurate to call it immersion rather than swimming. This time it was just the two of us and we cycled to a different beach, on the north coast, in a less sheltered area. The water was MUCH colder and I barely lasted two minutes before I felt my hands and feet going numb. It still feels amazing though! And the weather during my whole visit was dry, sunny, and not very windy by Orkney standards. Which means it was balmy summer weather… for Orkney. Which means I wore all of my clothes (including two pairs of leggings) and borrowed a wool jumper (aka sweater) from Jessica that I wore every day, usually under my fleece hoodie. With the hood up. (If you visit, any time of year, wool sweaters and hats are highly recommended.) 

 

For dinner Jessica defrosted one of her own chickens from the freezer and roasted it with a side of homegrown runner beans with chorizo which were also fabulous. And potatoes, maybe? Oh, and that was the gooseberry pie night. I picked a ridiculous number of gooseberries from the immense forest tangle in the back of the garden and Jessica made them into a scrumptious pie with a lard-based crust specially for me (since I can’t eat butter due to a milk protein allergy).

 

Jessica makes AMAZING bread too! And makes yogurt almost every day which sadly I can’t eat because of my dairy allergy but which looks absolutely fantastic—full fat and nice thick Greek style because she strains it. The resulting whey gets mixed with the chickens’ food.

 

Part III – North Ronaldsay Day Trip!

 

View of Sanday from the ferry to North Ronaldsay.

North Ronaldsay lighthouse

Sunday was the long-awaited North Ronaldsay outing. North Ronaldsay is the farthest north of the North Isles, the group of islands that includes Sanday. (FYI, for all of the islands that have names ending in “ay,” that syllable is pronounced like “ee” so Sanday is pronounced Sandy and Ronaldsay is pronounced Ronaldsee.) Sanday is quite a large island—the third largest of the Orkney islands—and it stretches quite close to North Ronaldsay: the distance from the closest point on Sanday to the closest point on North Ronaldsay is just 2.5 miles (4 km). Not quite swimming distance, but I feel like you could put on a wetsuit and paddle there on an inner tube in a couple of hours—or sail there in a few minutes if the crazy Orkney winds were in your favor. But you can’t really do that, so instead to get there you have to take a ferry to Kirkwall port on Mainland, then another ferry to North Ronaldsay. That ferry only goes to North Ronaldsay three times a week from May to October, and only once a week the rest of the year. There is an airport, so you can actually fly on a tiny plane between Sanday and North Ronaldsay, but again the flight stops in Kirkwall along the way. And it’s a flight But here’s the thing: two or three times over the summer, the ferry company has special North Isle day trips that go directly from Sanday to North Ronaldsay. Jessica had told me about this day trip more than a month in advance so I had scheduled it into my plans to be there. I had read all about the famous seaweed-eating North Ronaldsay sheep and was eager to see them in person.

North Ronaldsay tide pools

We cycled the seven miles (11 km) to the ferry and there wasn’t much wind so we got there in plenty of time. The ferry ride was fun: it takes a long time because Sanday’s ferry port is on the far southwestern tip of the island while North Ronaldsay is just north of the northeastern tip of Sanday, so you have to travel along the whole northern coast of Sanday to get there. But it’s direct! And it’s really cool to see Sanday from the ferry!

 

When you get to North Ronaldsay, the first fun thing to do is watch the cars come off the ferry. With most ferries, the cars can drive off via a ramp, but the North Ronaldsay harbour is not set up to allow this. Unfortunately I failed to take a photo of how they get the cars off the ferry so instead I’m going to link to a photo on the blog of a Mainland resident who wrote about this very thing back in 2012. Yes, they basically lift the cars off the ferry in hammocks. It’s wild to watch.

North Ronaldsay beach

 

We had our bikes with us so we cycled across the entire length of the island to the lighthouse at the far end—a whole four miles away (6.5 km). Jessica had been looking forward to eating lunch at the lighthouse visitor center café, because the last time she visited it was closed, and the chef there is supposed to be really good. Plus we were hungry after two bike rides and a ferry ride, so we decided to eat first and explore afterwards. Unfortunately, given the ferry day trip timing and the slow pace of service at a tiny café suddenly flooded with day trippers, that meant we didn’t have as much time to explore as we might have liked. But our burgers were pretty tasty!

 

Sheep walking on the sea wall!

After eating we bought a couple of postcards at the gift shop, and I bought a hat made from the wool of the local sheep. It was cute but I bought it mostly to keep my head warm! The local wool is pretty itchy but I liked the design with a mix of natural (undyed) wool colors. Then we walked down to the beach wall near the old lighthouse to check out the sheep. North Ronaldsay sheep are very small and cute, with different colored fleece ranging from off-white through various shades of brown to black. They stick close together and move in groups. We wandered onto the beach to check out the tide pools since it was low tide. The water is so clear and the tide pools are beautiful. A large group of arctic terns started yelling at us and dive-bombing us so they must have had some nests near where we were standing. They kept it up for the whole time we were there. I’m pretty sure we weren’t harming their nests (we didn’t see any) but in retrospect we probably should have gone elsewhere so as not to disturb them. They were so cool though! These birds nest on North Ronaldsay and spend the winters 10,000 miles away in Antarctica. Impressive. Of course I failed to take any photos of them so here’s a lovely photo of an arctic tern in North Ronaldsay from someone else’s blog about a day trip back in 2017.

Happy birthday, Greg!
Here's your postcard.

 

At this point we basically no longer had time for a lighthouse tour (which takes about an hour) so we just rode back across the island to the harbour. We stopped along the way so Jessica could mail a postcard to Greg for his birthday. And we stopped along the road to marvel at the giant slabs of thick, heavy, slate-like stone used as roofing for the island’s stone cottages. How do they get those slabs up there? When we got to the beach right next to the harbour, we were treated by the sight of a flock of sheep munching away on seaweed. When a beachgoer got too close, they ran off in a group, one of them trailing a long swath of seaweed from its mouth.

 

Sheep hoofprints in the sand.

We got back to Sanday pretty exhausted and hungry. It’s the sea air! Thankfully it was Danny’s turn to make dinner, so he cooked up haggis #2 and made some excellent chips and yummy garden veg sautéed with onion and garlic. And we finished the gooseberry pie, I think. A delicious meal to end our day.

Sheep eating seaweed on the beach at the harbour!

 

Part IV - The Craft Hub & Goodbye, Sanday

Postbox in Kettletoft. Collection times
vary according to flight times.

 

Monday was my final day on Sanday and Jessica had to work, so I organized my day around visiting her during her shift at the Sanday Community Craft Hub. I rode my bike to Kettletoft and mailed my North Ronaldsay postcard from the mailbox there. I ate a tasty vegetable soup at the Craft Hub, chatted with Jessica and Aaron, and bought another wool hat, this one less decorative but cheaper and softer, made from merino wool I think?

 

A fine cockerel.

That reminds me that I haven’t mentioned Jessica’s sheep and I somehow failed to take any photos of them so I’ll have to leave that to Jessica to remedy but they are also very cute. They are Shetland sheep, a breed that originates in the Shetland archipelago north east of Orkney. I also forgot to mention the chickens (other than the one we ate, which had been in the freezer). They are fine birds, in a variety of colors, and if you look closely at the greyish-white looking hens they have a beautiful design on their feathers.

The cockerel that replaced Mental (who was mean and therefore got eaten) is a calm and impressive bird who seems to take pride in his flock. The hens were mostly too young to be laying so we didn’t really have eggs while I was there, but by now they are probably laying regularly. Hopefully Jessica will update us all about that. 

Next to the Craft Hub is a bank building. I was amused by the signage—the juxtaposition of the nice bold letters “we’re here to help,” “here for you,” with the hastily scribbled “no bank until further notice”—and mentioned this to Jessica and Aaron. Aaron described having seen a van come and load up all of the bank’s contents and drive away with them, including some heavy-looking safes, the week before my visit. So it seems the bank will not be “here for you”—or for anyone else—for the foreseeable future. That’s OK, because you can still get cash out from the post office. Yes, Sanday has a post office.

Once a bank. Now? No bank until further notice.

 

This little monster. Again.

If I’m remembering right, after Jessica’s shift ended we went swimming near Kettletoft Bay, and then to the community store so Jessica could buy some milk and other supplies. Then we rode back to Sparrowhall, which by the way has tons of sparrows living around it, and I packed up my stuff, said goodbye, and rode off to the harbour to catch the evening ferry to Kirkwall, and from there, an overnight ferry to Aberdeen. I was sad to leave Sparrowhall and Sanday and Orkney and I am looking forward to my next visit. Thanks Jessica and Danny for the hospitality!

 

Sparrowhall! And the only proper tree for miles.